History of Quebec French

History Of Quebec French

Quebec French is substantially different in pronunciation and vocabulary to the French of Europe and that of France's Second Empire colonies in Africa and Asia.

Similar divergences took place in the Portuguese, Spanish and English language of the Americas with respect to European dialects, but in the case of French the separation was increased by the reduction of cultural contacts with France after the 1763 Treaty of Paris in which France ceded Canada to Great Britain.

Although Quebecisms like moé and toé are today considered substandard slang pronunciations (joual), these were the pronunciations of Early Modern French used by the kings of France, the aristocracy and the common people in many provinces of France. After the French Revolution, the standard pronunciation in France changed to that of the bourgeois class in Paris, but Quebec retained many pronunciations and expressions shared with modern Oïl languages such as Norman, Gallo, Picard, Poitevin and Saintongeais. Speakers of these languages of France predominated among the settlers of New France. Quebec French was also influenced by the French spoken by the King's Daughters who were of the petit-bourgeois class from the Paris area (Île-de-France) and Normandy.

Thus, whereas it was 18th century bourgeois Parisian French that eventually became the national, standardized language of France after the French Revolution, the French of the Ancien Régime kept evolving on its own in Canada. Indeed, the French spoken in Canada is closer idiomatically and phonetically to Belgian French despite their independent evolution and the relatively small number of Belgian immigrants to Quebec (although it is to be remembered that the influence of the Walloon language in Belgium has influenced the language in the same way as the presence of the Oïl speakers in Quebec).

There is also the undeniable fact that Canadian-French speakers have lived alongside and among English speakers for two and a half centuries ever since the beginning of British administration in 1763. Thus anglicisms in Quebec French tend to be longstanding and part of a gradual, natural process of borrowing, whereas the often entirely different anglicisms in European French are nearly all much more recent and sometimes driven by fads and fashions.

Some people (for instance, Léandre Bergeron, author of the Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise) have referred to Quebec French as la langue québécoise (the Québécois language); most speakers, however, would reject or even take offence to the idea that they do not speak French.